microgrids

In July, Greenpeace installed a solar/battery microgrid in the village of Dharnai in eastern India. The 100-kilowatt system was designed to provide power for the village’s residents, businesses, and schools. A few months later, the government utility extended the national grid and made the solar microgrid obsolete.[read more]

Combined heat and power tech are sometimes overlooked as assets that can be deployed in Smart Grids and microgrids in North America. Also known as cogeneration, it is defined as the production of electricity and useful thermal energy from a single fuel source, typically located at the point of consumption.[read more]

Microgrids provoke a multitude of views. For the Department of Energy, developing advanced microgrids can help build new electricity resources for customers, the community, and the macrogrid. For the Department of Defense, microgrids deliver energy security for military bases and mobile operations.[read more]

Superstorm Sandy crippled much of New Jersey’s critical infrastructure two years ago. Stuck without power at home, many also couldn’t get to work because the operations center for New Jersey Transit flooded, damaging backup power systems, emergency generation, and the computers that control train operations.[read more]

Rather than view microgrids as new competitors to traditional electricity distribution utilities, perhaps these local networks of distributed generators, smart electricity loads, and energy storage devices should be seen as a new business opportunity.[read more]

As the New York Public Service Commission debates a proposal to reform the state's distribution utilities, Central Hudson Gas & Electric is getting out in front of the coming changes. The utility filed a $46 million rate case with the PSC last week, packaged under the title "Value for our Valley."[read more]

Consolidated Edison is taking a new approach to delivering reliable power that is as radical as the gentrification sweeping New York’s outer boroughs. Con Ed filed a proposal for a Brooklyn/Queens Demand Management Program, or BQDM, that it hopes can defer the cost of building a $1 billion substation.[read more]

There is just over a gigawatt worth of microgrids scattered throughout the country. While many of those projects have proved their value during major storms or extended outages, they are largely custom-engineered and limited to public facilities like schools, hospitals and military bases.[read more]

The electrical grid is an aging beast, cobbled together from disparate pieces to form the infrastructure on which all modern life depends. Sometimes it seems like we are teetering at the edge of disaster, a single storm or terrorist attack away from a devastating outage. Can resiliency save us?[read more]

Microgrids -- autonomous yet connected islands of energy generation and control -- could be important building blocks of a truly resilient, solar and wind-integrated power grid. Someday. But the vast majority of the microgrids in the U.S. use traditional combined heat and power and fossil-fuel-fired generation.[read more]

What will be the single biggest change in energy usage over the next 40 years? “I believe this is best described in terms of democratization of energy,” said Dr. Michael Weinhold. “By this I mean that many more people will come to own, or share in the ownership of production, distribution and storage of energy."[read more]

The grid edge is all around us. Historically, distributed generation has largely been limited to a handful of progressive states. But as new maps show, solar, storage and microgrid applications are expanding beyond those traditional borders and leaving their imprint on the grid.[read more]

There is a design and configuration practice called “graceful degradation” in telecom circles. It diverts all communications functionality to a limited group of subscribers that have the most critical needs. Microgrids present interesting possibilities to similarly support graceful degradation.[read more]

Microgrids are the most recent topic du jour in grid modernization, but there is far more talk than action about it. Most of the activity today is happening at universities and military installations, but cities are poised to take a larger role in coming years.[read more]

New York governor Andrew Cuomo has put $40 million in prize money behind his push to bolster the state’s post-Hurricane Sandy storm resilience with community microgrids. Will that be enough to overcome barriers that have challenged efforts to create microgrids in the Empire State?[read more]